Dedication to the Count of Lemos

When I sent Your Excellency my plays some days ago, printed before they were performed, I said, if I remember rightly, that Don Quixote had his spurs on and was ready to go and kiss Your Excellency’s hands; and now I say that he has put them on and set out on the road, and if he arrives there, it seems to me that I shall have done Your Excellency some service, because from countless quarters I am being pressed in great haste to send him, to take away the loathing and nausea caused by another Don Quixote, who, under the name of a second part, has gone about the globe in disguise; and the one who has shown the greatest desire for him has been the great emperor of China, for about a month ago he wrote me a letter in the Chinese tongue by a special messenger, asking me, or, to put it better, begging me, to send it to him, because he wished to found a college where the Castilian language would be taught, and he wanted the book read there to be the history of Don Quixote. Together with this, he told me that I should go and be the rector of that college.

I asked the bearer whether His Majesty had given him any allowance for my expenses. He answered that the thought had never crossed his mind. “Well then, brother,” I answered him, “you can go back to your China at ten leagues a day, or at twenty, or at whatever rate you were dispatched, because I am not in health to set out on so long a journey; besides, on top of being ill, I am very short of money, and, emperor for emperor and monarch for monarch, in Naples I have the great Count of Lemos, who, without so many little titles of colleges or rectorships, supports me, protects me, and does me more favor than I could manage to wish for.”

With this I dismissed him, and with this I take my leave, offering Your Excellency the Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda, a book I shall finish within four months, Deo volente (God willing); which is bound to be either the worst or the best book ever composed in our tongue, of those written for entertainment, I mean; and I say that I repent of having said the worst, because, in the opinion of my friends, it is bound to reach the utmost height of excellence possible.

May Your Excellency come in the health that is wished for you; for Persiles will by then be ready to kiss your hands, and I your feet, as the servant of Your Excellency that I am. From Madrid, the last day of October, one thousand six hundred and fifteen.

Your Excellency’s servant,

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.